A Radical Cut In The Texture Of Reality

August 17, 2017

Contrary to common-sense understanding, the transformations of self-identity are not just a personal matter. Historical shifts out there provide the social conditions of existence of personal and psychic change in here. What mattered was how I positioned myself on the other side - or positioned myself to catch the other side: how I was, involuntarily, hailed by and interpellated into a broader social discourse. Only by discovering this did I begin to understand that what black identity involved was a social, political, historical and symbolic event, not just a personal, and certainly not simply a genetic, one.

From this I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact identity is always a never-completed process of becoming - a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.

August 13, 2017

In this spirit Cherríe Moraga remains “passionately committed to an art of resistance to domination by Anglo-America.” And what is her vision for the future? She says the words few people utter aloud: “If the Soviet Union could dissolve, why not the United States?” Why not, indeed? And why not a new confederacy of equal, mutually respectful cultures and peoples? “The road to our future is the road from our past.”

August 11, 2017

"One avenue into understanding men’s loneliness is to consider how children are socialized. In an interview, Niobe Way, a lecturer at New York University who has worked with adolescent boys for over two decades, talked about how we are failing boys. “The social and emotional skills necessary for boys to thrive are just not being fostered,” she said in an interview. Indeed, when you look at the research, men do not start life as the stereotypes we become. Six-month-old boys are likely to “cry more than girls,” more likely to express joy at the sight of our mother’s faces, and more likely to match our expressions to theirs. In general, before the age of four or five, research shows that boys are more emotive than girls.

The change begins around the time we start school: at that age—about five—boys become worse than girls at “changing our facial expressions to foster social relationships.” This is the beginning of a socialization process in “a culture that supports emotional development for girls and discourages it for boys,” according to Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. This begins to affect our friendships early—in a study in New Haven, Connecticut, boys aged 10-18 were significantly worse than girls at knowing who their friends were: “over a two-week period, the boys changed their nomination of who their best friend was more frequently than girls, and their nomination was less likely to be reciprocated.”

Still, there’ll never be better soil than school in which to grow friendships, and most boys do find good friends as children. Way, who summarized her findings in her book Deep Secrets, found that, up until early adolescence, boys are not shy about how much they love their friends. Way quotes one boy named Justin in his first year of high school: “[My best friend and I] love each other… That’s it… you have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. … I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect, and love for each other.” Another high school freshman, Jason, told Way friendships were important because then “you are not lonely … you need someone to turn to when things are bad.”

However, for many boys—Way calls it “near-universal”—a shift occurs in late adolescence, roughly from the ages of 15-20. In a phase of life we often think of in optimistic terms—self-discovery, coming of age—boys’ trust in each other shatters like glass. Three years after his first interview, Jason, asked if he had any close friends, said no, “and immediately adds that while he has nothing against gay people, he himself is not gay.” Another boy interviewed by Way in the eleventh grade who up until the year before had maintained a best friendship for ten years said he now had no friends because “you can’t trust nobody these days.” In interviews with thousands of boys, Way saw a tight correlation between confiding in close friends and mental health, and she observed that, across all ethnic groups and income brackets, three quarters of the boys she spoke to “grow fearful of betrayal by and distrustful of their male peers” in late adolescence, and “begin to speak increasingly of feeling lonely and depressed.”

Making matters worse, in the middle of this estrangement from other boys, as we’re becoming young men, we’re governed more than ever by a new set of rules about what behaviour we’re allowed to show. Psychologists call them display rules. “Expressions of hurt and worry and of care and concern for others,” according to white high schools boys, are “gay” or “girly.” Black and Hispanic boys, according to Way’s interviews, feel pressure to conform to even stricter rules. Men who break the rules, and express “sadness, depression, fear, and dysphoric self-conscious emotions such as shame and embarrassment” are viewed as “unmanly” and are comforted less than women. Way told me when she speaks in public, she often quotes a 16-year-old boy who said, “It might be nice to be a girl, ‘cause then I wouldn’t have to be emotionless.”

August 10, 2017

Keith Connolly: What then, would you say, is the state of Maher Shalal Hash Baz today?

Tori Kudo: That’s a difficult question. It’s very difficult to run, though I am trying. In a way it could be said that Maher does not exist anymore. All the original members are gone, so now I accept whoever comes to Maher, and they are more like participants. I can continue that way, and I can create songs, so if you want to call that Maher, it’s okay. In some ways it is becoming more of a theatrical undertaking, akin maybe to Pasolini with all his actors being like a theater group, or the same actors playing in different films. I have worked with the Montreal-based playwright Jacob Wren in creating the play “No Double Life for the Wicked,” about the members of Maher and their daily lives. For example, in the play I am making pottery. It’s an attempt to show how Maher has become Maher, a kind of meta-Maher.

August 5, 2017

"The artists I work with turn to emotion because this is where ideology does its most devastating work."
– Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me

Now we are at the very beginning of a new project. It hasn’t quite started yet and I still very much don’t know what it will be. Somehow I still have the feeling that it could be absolutely anything. It is this moment of complete possibility, the moment before anything has actually started, that I’ve always found most energizing. I am not sure this is anything to be proud of. As we often do, we’re starting with a title: Emotional Politics. And, as the title suggests, I am thinking the project will have something to do with the relationship between politics and emotion.

+ + + +

As I’ve moved forward through the years, in some ways I’ve always attempted to erase and undo my past. In some sense this book is a counter-attempt to not erase the past twenty years. I’ve always liked the idea of artists having “periods”: Picasso with his rose period, his blue period, his cubist period, etc. I once again have the feeling I need to put recent work behind me, to enter into a new period, with little idea what this new period might actually become. I once tried to cordon my work into four decade long periods (also including the next ten years):

Because along with emotion and politics, all of the questions I find myself asking these days are around decolonization, around whiteness, white supremacy, white fragility, white saviorism, white guilt, structural inequality, anti-racism, intersectionality and how all of these realities factor into the ways I live and work. My collaboration with PME-ART started by bringing Anglophone and Francophone artists to work together with En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, a bringing together that wasn’t happening so often and still doesn’t happen nearly enough. This was a certain kind of bringing together that felt important to me at the time. But these days I’m definitely feeling that art is simply too white and that it has to change.

+ + + +

I’ve always felt so strongly that there is something very political about being yourself in a performance situation. But now, after twenty years, I say this with somewhat less confidence than I once did. I think it is political because it undoes some of the hierarchy between those on stage and those watching, and if those on and off stage are more equal, then everyone can of course be on stage, can be involved, can be on the performance stage or the political one, can find a stage to speak out against injustice or get involved in whatever ways feel most vital. I still believe all of this is artistically true. However, saying a work of art is political is very different from saying that it’s politically effective. Like many artists, or perhaps more precisely like a specific kind of artist who intensely desires the political, I’m always wondering if I’m doing enough. And of course I always know that I’m not.

+ + + +

People might think they’re making rational decisions but often, perhaps without even knowing it, they’re essentially making emotional decisions. But where does emotion stop and thinking begin? Even to put it in these terms feels obnoxious and misguided. Such distinctions are artificial. Thinking and emotion are completely intertwined. To believe otherwise is to block so many genuine possibilities. In Western democratic politics the rational decision is supposed to rule the day. What could democracy possibly mean if people are unable to make rational decisions as to what is best for the society they are a part of? However, as we know, current electoral politics, much like advertising, often plays directly to the emotions of the voter. I’m certainly not saying this is only a bad thing. What I’m getting at is how we all need to understand this process so much more. And how in further understanding it we might begin to change the ways it does and doesn’t work on us.

But, then again, I’m not only, or even mainly, thinking about electoral politics. I’m thinking of politics as a question of how we treat each other, of caring and cruelty and how they relate to emotions such as love and anger. I’m also wondering if there’s room for more emotion in PME-ART shows. In performance I associate emotion with acting, with being fake. With the opposite of what I’m searching for. However, if rejecting emotion in terms of how we are supposed to make political decisions is limiting and misguided, it might be even more so in relation to making art. I have absolutely no problem writing with great emotion, but in performance I generally find it to be more of a conundrum.

In PME-ART we perform as ourselves. In life, I rarely display much emotion. Like the good male child I was raised to be I most often – without even realizing I am doing so – repress it. I often think my depression substantially consists of repressed anger and sadness. And, because I suspect I often set the tone for our work, I also wonder if there might be something emotionally repressed about how we create and perform. Or at the very least something straight and male (which others continuously undercut with their own contributions.) In the past I didn’t see it this way. I would have probably attributed this lack of expressed emotion to the fact of repetition. If I give a performance once, and some emotion arises in me as I am doing so, I am completely open to going with it. But how to do so over and over again without it feeling completely fake? How to do so in front of an audience without feeling I must deliver the emotions on cue? In Emotional Politics I mainly imagine us talking about emotions rather than embodying them. Yet I also find myself wondering what are the ways I haven’t thought of yet that might allow us to go further (or explore in different registers from our previous work.) At the moment I simply have no idea. It feels impossible to me. But that’s also the feeling that makes me want to do it. Maybe it will be really bad but is there a way to turn it inside out and make it good again. Is this the road we’re really going to pursue or is it only a footpath to take us out onto the actual road we will eventually end up pursuing? At this early stage I still have no idea.

And then I wonder if perhaps some of our performances have contained far more emotion than I know or realize. And how the emotion comes from the encounter between us and the audience in ways that are extremely difficult to pin down or describe, and in fact are very difficult to be certain of because they happen in the moment and then, just as quickly, are gone.

+ + + +

A few weeks ago I found myself thinking about The Wooster Group again. I believe I haven’t seen a show by them in over fifteen years, but seeing their show L.S.D. (Just the High Points) at Harbourfront Centre in 1989, and reading a great deal about them during the same period, was probably the single most significant event in leading me to want to make the kind of performances I’ve more or less dedicated my life to. And then when I started touring, about ten years later, I met or heard about many other groups and companies that were also catalyzed by their first experiences with The Wooster Group, and also next generation companies who were later inspired by the companies that were first inspired by The Wooster Group. It reminds me of a story I once heard about The Ramones. The first time The Ramones toured the U.S. there were basically no punk bands to open for them. But the second time they toured, there was an opening band in every town, all consisting of young people who had seen The Ramones on their previous tour and then decided to form punk bands of their own.

Both The Ramones and The Wooster Group came out of a kind of New York City lower east side zeitgeist (which for me also has some relation to U.S cultural imperialism.) As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve always worried that we had no zeitgeist, though I suppose in many ways I’ve spent my life searching for one, all the while trying to tell myself that it’s never too late. In a sense, zeitgeist is always also a collective feeling of protest, and it has been argued that the past ten years plus have been a golden age of protest: the alter-globalization movement, the battle in Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, the Rolling Jubilee, Tahrir Square, Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, mass protests against Trump, etc. None of these protests have done as much they originally hoped but they all did something. I also realize I’m still romanticizing zeitgeists. If I were to actually experience one I probably wouldn’t like it.

+ + + +

The Ramones were white and The Wooster Group are white (as are many of the other artists and writers I’ve referenced in this book.) Despite much work currently being done to change things, Western art and culture remain primarily white spaces (which is not to excuse myself, I really should have done better. But, at the same time, I didn’t want to rewrite the past to make it sound like I was more woke than I actually was at the time. Instead, I want to rewrite the future.) Much of my internet reading over the past five or so years has been about feminism and anti-racism. For as long as I can remember I’ve felt myself to be pro-feminist and anti-racist – which certainly doesn’t mean I’ve always lived up to my ideals – but more recently I’ve encountered concepts I didn’t previously know about such as white fragility and white saviourism. These concepts have a lot to do with why white spaces remain so white, with how white people react when these spaces are challenged, and how such defensive reactions work to reinforce the status quo.

My internet reading about feminism and anti-racism (alongside many important conversations) has had an enormous impact on my recent thinking and yet I’m still trying to figure out how to incorporate this thinking into my life and work. Many others I know are also currently trying to do the same. I think: PME-ART is about collaboration and therefore this collaborative spirit represents and opening through which to do something. I think: our work is about being yourself in a performance situation, so when the selves change, when new creator/performers are invited to join, then the work then changes as well. And I want the work to change. But how much am I able to let it change, how much am I willing to let go? With each new collaborative project this is always a primary question.

I can feel my reticence. How reluctant I am to write about these questions. The main thing is that it is all still in the future. We haven’t actually tried anything yet and don’t even know exactly what we plan to try. But also, in writing this, I can feel myself treading carefully, feel that I don’t want to misstep. I have noticed that when white artists attempt to make anti-racist art they sometimes miss the mark and end up making racist art by mistake. They are too deeply entrenched within their own limited perspective, within their: ‘I’m an artist and therefore I can do whatever I want.’ (I think the artist has an ethical responsibility but, then again, I don’t think there’s any fixed way of understanding exactly what that responsibility is.) I hope collaboration and co-authorship is a way through and past this dilemma but I know from twenty years of experience that real collaboration is never easy. I feel the slogan ‘nothing about us without us’ speaks to the matter most concisely. But still, it is always possible to get it wrong. And walking on eggshells has never produced the best art.

+ + + +

All of this is very much about me, and yet it is my hope that Emotional Politics is the PME-ART show we make that will be the most not about me. Is it possible to decenter myself within our work? What might this look or feel like? Some recent projects have been more about me, and now it’s time to turn around, head in the opposite direction. To find ways for PME-ART to be more about others. I’m nervous to write this, worried that after Emotional Politics has been made and toured, I’ll look back on these words and see how far away what we actually did was from my original hopes. And yet that is also the nature of our work. It starts somewhere, goes through an extensive, if rather imperfect, collaborative process, and ends up somewhere else, somewhere completely different, somewhere no one could predict.

The very beginning of a new project. Before the beginning. The pre-beginning. When everything is still possible. I want to hang onto this feeling for as long as I can, not to fix anything before it’s absolutely necessary, still be open to artistic possibilities that, as of yet, I am still completely unable to conceive. Is it really true that these things happen, that our work spins out in directions I am unable to imagine before they begin? Is this only a fantasy I have about the work, about the possibilities of art, or about the possibilities of collaborative art? I can see it both ways. And perhaps both ways can come together: such things might actually happen because they begin as fantasies, as searching, as curiosity, as openness. When something appears that you think you’ve never seen before, within your own work or the work of others, you can’t let it slip by unnoticed, you need to be paying attention, follow it, see where it leads.

[Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART is a new book I'm currently working on which is scheduled to come out from BookThug in Spring 2018.]

July 17, 2017

Luther Konadu: So knowing that as a writer, how do you carry on and continue to sustain a writing career knowing that maybe no one might read your book?

Chris Kraus: Well, it’s not one. You can find people to read your book, even if it doesn’t have that corporate media support. Do you know the work of the Montreal writer Jacob Wren?

Luther Konadu: No, I don’t.

Chris Kraus: He hasn’t been commercially published, but he’s prolific, persistent and important, and he puts his work online all the time. He’s built a tremendous following in the last ten years. He started at a point where no one knew his work, and now pretty much everyone in the alt-lit world, where the real readers are, knows his work and takes it seriously. And touring helps. When I Love Dick came out in 1997, I toured a lot. Maybe fifteen people would show up, and then they’d talk about it to their friends. And often, a book will mean more when people discover it themselves than when they order it on Amazon because it’s all over the internet.

The world experienced a revolution in 1492. In 1498 it experienced another. The results were hardly beneficial but they have come to be remembered as revolutions. Let us accept them and assess them as such. In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. In 1498 Vasco da Gama was exploring Africa and passing behind Africa was able to reach India. Following these two encounters a period of savagery and oppression begins on earth. The wealth of the locals whose land had been “discovered” were seized. The foundations of the capitalist nation-state were being laid in the flows of Mercantilism. The nation-state, whose foundations had been laid in this period, became much stronger during its classical period in the 19th Century. The savagery which emerged with this development was of its own creation. It also had the name of capitalism. It looked upon life, communities, societies, and nature only with the eyes of the colonialist. Externally it developed through oppression, colonialism, and pillage, while internally it did not recognize the right to life of the poorer classes. Representatives of the church also played a role in these developments, for example Robert Malthus. Economic developments in the world grew along this first course.

The second course began with the publication of the Communist Manifesto developed under the leadership of Karl Marx in the 1840s. Existing savagery and oppression in the market was to be taken from the capitalists and transferred to the state. The second course developed in opposition to the first. The 20th Century saw a little development in this direction but it was not able to produce a solution for the social or economic problems of humanity. Nor could it solve the problems of freedom for communities, peoples and cultures. Communities were only considered with respect to economic factors. For that reason the problems of freedom, equality, and justice could not be solved. This [second] course was shaped by Marxist-Leninism. It became concrete in the guise of the Soviet Union. It saw some development. However it was also organized as a dictatorship of the Proletariat. Capitalist countries closed themselves against it in fear. They were seized with fear that communism would spread from Eastern to Western Europe. For this reason certain social and economic schools of thought founded in the West came out with a third course. This was a new course. Its goal was to obstruct the spread of Communism in Europe, to prevent it. They planned to accomplish this by returning some of the rights seized from the poor and from workers during capitalism’s development. This third course became stronger through the 1950s, 60s and 70s. This course created a beautiful life for the workers of Germany, France and Switzerland. Workers became the bearers of other rights than just labor rights. In the Scandinavian countries workers achieved this at a very high level.

In 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, this course disappeared. Capitalism took back the rights which it had recognized for workers out of fear of communism one by one.

The course set out by the Kurdish People’s leader Abdullah Öcalan emerges in the 1990s after this collapse. It strengthened as it went forward. For that reason I don’t think that calling it a third course quite fits. In fact it sounds as if it is an attempt to identify it with the third course that has collapsed and is disappearing [in the West.] This course, whose foundations were laid in the 1990s, became laid in more general terms after 1999. The details became clearer after 2007. Because in these years a crisis of capitalism was emerging. In my opinion this course is a fourth course as regards the economy. Not the third course. It is a course that rests on society, social development, life, and the organization of life. It is a course which comments on and evaluates Capitalism, Marxism, and the opinions of Rosa Luxembourg. It is a course which is against a monopoly economy. It is a course that will protect the existence of communities in so much that it is a course that pays attention to ecology to the upmost. It is a course that will find a solution for the social and economic problems of the people of the region and the world. Of course for this course to develop it must be well-presented. We cannot keep it to ourselves. We need to familiarize [others] with it through practical steps.

July 10, 2017

Maybe you're thinking I should take everything my friend Lun-Yu tells me with a grain of salt. She also told me that day one of her favorite psychoanalytic theorists was Wilfred Bion. I'd never read Bion before, so after she left I read a bit about him, and I found online the complete text of a seminar he held in Paris in 1978. The beginning of this seminar is very interesting. At least it was to me. Bion says that he wants his listeners to imagine a scenario: they're seeing a new patient, a twenty-five-year-old man who comes in complaining of some dissatisfaction in his family life. Bion says he's not sure what family the man is referring to, and asks his age, which the man gives as forty-five. Bion is confused. He just said the man was twenty-five, and then he notices that the patient has wrinkles, and appears in his sixties. He asks his listeners to consider this confusing state of affairs and to determine whether they would, under the circumstances, take on such a patient.

He says the question is much like the question of what you would do if you walked into a bookstore, picked up a book, and read the scenario he just described. He asks you if you would continue reading this book. Then he says, imagine it's not a book, but a piece of music. Or a building you're in, and you see the way the light falls, you see the colors coming through the window. Do you want to think about the window some more?

I imagine these questions were somewhat perplexing to some of the participants in the seminar. At one point in the transcript, someone in the audience makes an "inaudible reference" to "psychotic experience." Bion calls that a very "cerebral" question, not a practical one to the analyst. He says that analysts shouldn't be blinded by labels like manic-depressive or schizophrenic. Rather, they should be asking themselves what kinds of artists they are and whether there's an interesting spark that occurs with a potential analysand that might lead to something productive in the consulting room or, as he puts it, the "atelier." Somebody asks what an analyst is supposed to do if he's not really the artistic type, and Bion says that if that's the case, then the person's in the wrong line of work. In fact, he says, he doesn't even really know what would be the right line of work, since a person needs to be an artist in everyday life.

The he throws out the term artist, which has obviously become meaningless. The point is, he tells them, that reducing things to "scientific" diagnoses or narrow definitions is really the death of things. "You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable."

Obviously I loved that. I wrote Lun-Yu and told her about the seminar I'd read and how it had moved me. She said, "Oh, that's the 'bad' Bion, from his mystical phase. That's also the part I love best." Apparently sometimes he wasn't quite so wacky.

May 2, 2017

Jacob Wren explores the boundaries and overlap between art, politics and fiction in his writing and filmmaking. On his blog, “A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality”, he returns repeatedly to ideas of activism and, in particular, ending, subverting or re­organizing capitalism. But Wren never fully inhabits a fixed ideology: wherever his work takes a position, it also questions that position.

Wren’s previous works include Polyamorous Love Song (2014), a multi-narrative novel about resistance and identity in both artistic and political movements, and the fragmentary Families Are Formed Through Copulation (2007), by turns paranoid and cynical. His new novel, Rich and Poor, is perhaps more accessible than his earlier fiction, being told through a straightforward alternating narrative, but is equally replete with ideas. As the title suggests, one narrative follows the story of a poor person, a former concert pianist and current restaurant dishwasher who decides to kill the CEO of a massive corporation; the other narrative is the perspective of this billionaire CEO. In the first half, the poor character fails to kill the CEO despite having got a job with his company for this precise purpose. In the second half, he tries a rather different approach.

There are subtle echoes of each story in the other – confirmations, elaborations and contradictions. Both extreme positions are tempered by each character having experienced the other’s situation to a degree, and by their ability to understand, although not agree with, the other’s position. The rich man is presented not as some kind of unknowable, sociopathic enemy but as someone who makes compromises and accommodations like everyone else:

You drive your car knowing it is disastrous for the environment, and yet continue to drive anyway... You think it is terrible but not so terrible you are ready to drop everything and take action. Myself, I would prefer to run my business without any recourse to violence, but also, I have to admit, I don’t feel so strongly about it. And if I were to do so, it would be impossible to remain competitive. Profits would suffer.

In Rich and Poor form and content are an intriguing blend. It might seem odd to praise a writer known for surrealism and experimental forms for creating complex, believable characters, but Wren’s ability to do this allows him more leeway with some slightly improbable plot twists and a formal style that packs in a great deal of political argument. This is writing that campaigns against complacency while avoiding self-righteousness. Like Wren’s other work, this book is essentially not so much a call to action as a call for the reader to step away from apathy and to take seriously, however briefly, the most radical of positions.

April 11, 2017

Last night I went to see the documentary Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective and for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I really felt: this is a solution. I knew about permaculture before, and always thought highly of it, but watching the documentary it suddenly seemed to be so much more. As a way of thinking, a way of understanding our lives, a way of regenerating soil, earth, land, ecosystems and everything that lives on them, a way of producing healthy food and maximizing clear water, it seems to me to create endless possibilities and therefore to effectively replace despair. I don't know particularly what to do with this information. I don't think I'm ever going to get involved with farming, so for the time being my only thought is to learn more about permaculture and encourage others to do the same.

About Me:

Jacob Wren makes literature, collaborative performances and exhibitions. His books include: Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, Polyamorous Love Song and Rich and Poor. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.